Where will you be 6-9 November 2017? We will be at the eXtreme365 2017 in Long Beach as a silver sponsor, presenting our powerful solutions to the audience.

The event is an important conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners with the following specials offering the possibility to connect with and learn from other partners, experts, implementers and developers:

• Real-time strategy updates on Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft roadmap from key Microsoft global leadership including Ron Huddleston, James Phillips and Alysa Taylor.
• Keynotes and sessions on how to effectively work with Microsoft with U.S. OCP leaders including Gretchen O’Hara (Go-to-Market Motion), Casey McGee (Build Motion), and Karen Del Vescovo (Sell Motion)
• Real-time updates across the Dynamics 365 workloads with the concentration on Sales, Marketing, Field Service, Customer Service, Talent, and Finance and Operations.
• Deep sales and technical content on the Intelligent Business Cloud components including the Common Data Service, PowerApps, Flow, Power BI, IoT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Azure platform services.
• Enrolling in the Executive Exchange gives you exclusive executive only access to deep-dive practice building sessions with Microsoft leadership and key industry experts.
• In-depth pre- and post-event full-day training sessions will expand your knowledge of specific ISV products as well as the Intelligent Business Cloud platform and Dynamics 365 applications. 

Register here to share strategies with peers, meet face to face with Microsoft leaders and dive deep into a bunch of interesting sessions and network opportunities. Whether it comes to strengthen your existing customer relationship or to make up new business connections, the value of eXtreme365 is outstanding! For full agenda go here. 

We will be happy to expand the limits of Dynamics 365 with YOU! See you soon at BOOTH #10!

This blog article outlines how to activate debugging for DocumentsCorePack Server Based. This step-by-step tutorial information refers to Microsoft Dynamics 365 only! 

Please note: There are two options to activate debugging. It depends on if you have a service or not. If you do not have a service, you will only need to follow the steps of the first option. Else please follow both options and send us the debugging files of both options. 

 

1) WITHOUT a service, activate debugging this way:  

 1) Please navigate to Settings > MSCRM ADDONS and click on DocumentsCorePack.  

Figure 1: Click on DocumentsCorePack

 

2) In the so opened Getting-started surface, switch to the General settings-tab and set Active Debugging and Active File Debugging on 'enabled'. 

Figure 2: Enable debugging

 3) The debugging logs will be stored in your installation directory. For example in: 

C:\Program Files (x86)\PTM EDV-Systeme GmbH\DocumentsCorePack Server for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365\Log

 

If you do not have a service, please also take steps 4) and 5), otherwise proceed with the 2. option (WITH service)! 

 

4) Repeat all the steps you took before until the error occurs! This is necessary to capture the error in our log-files. 

5) Please send these files and a short description on which steps were taken to support@mscrm-addons.com.

  

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2) WITH service, activate debugging this way:  

1) Go to the start-pane on the server where you have your DocumentsCorePack ServerBased installed and search for the DocumentsCorePack ServiceManagement like you can see below. 

 

 2) In the so opened window, you have the possibility to activate debugging. But first, select the ❶ service you want to debug and ❷ stop it if it is active. 

4) After these few steps, save your changes by clicking the [Save service configuration]-button and start your service again.  From now on you will find all your debugging logs in the folder, which you defined as Logfile Path before. 

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

This blog article outlines how to create a document for every contact of an account using the CreateMultiPartXMLbasedonFetchXML step. 

Please note: You have to make sure you first look into the basics of DocumentsCorePack workflow-steps, fetchXML and Dynamics 365 workflows before you start with this. It will make the progress a lot easier. 

In this case, we want to create a document for every contact of an account. To achieve this we need the CreateMultiPartXMLbasedonFetchXML step. 

1) Therefore create a new workflow based on  Account. Go to ❶ DCPWorkflowSandbox and select ❷ CreateMultiPartXMLbasedonFetchxml, like you can see below. 

2) Next define the properties of your new workflow step by clicking the [Set Properties]-button, highlighted below. 

 

5) Then define the properties as follows:

 

❶ Name: Choose a fitting name

❷ AutoMergeAction: Create Document

❸ PrimaryRecordURLFetchXML: The Record URL of the primary entity (in our example Account)

❹ SaveAs: Your desired output (in this example pdf)

❺ MultiDocumentXML: The XML output of the previous step 

How to create the Fetch XML

You can use 3^rd party tools like "XRMToolBox" to make the creation of the FechXML easier. 

1) Use the Dynamics 365 Advanced Find to get the base structure of the Fetch XML you want,  like you can see below. In this case, we wanted to merge all contacts of a particular Account. 

2) After building this verifying the result, download the FetchXML and paste it into your XML editor. Adjust the FetchXML so it can be executed correctly and has no syntax errors. 

This blog article outlines how to modify the subscription of our soltutions.

1) Please go to our website www.mscrm-addons.com, click on the [LOGIN]-button in the upper right side and enter your credentials.

 

2) Once registered click on the [My Account]-button, as you can see below highlighted in red. 

This blog article outlines how the Cloud service structure for DocumentsCorePack works. Once a customer sends a document generation request the service will grab the request from Dynamics 365, retrieve the data, generate the document and push it back to Dynamics 365. Afterwards, the document can be accessed by customers.    

As you can see in  the figure below, the sequence of the document generation is as follows:

1) Document Generation Request:
Once a document generation request is triggered by a Dynamics 365 user or from a Workflow, a Dynamics 365 record called "AutoMergeWorkingItem" fets generated in Dynamics 365. Documents requests can be sent manually from our user-driven document generation wizard. Also, document requests can be triggered from within Dynamics 365-Processes using our Process integration. 

2) Push Request to Document generation service in the Cloud:
As soon as the AutoMergeWorkingItem is saved, a web URL is called. This URL tells the Cloud-service that there is a new document to generate sitting in the Dynamics 365 environment. There is no data transfer at this point.

3) Document Generation:
The Cloud-service connects to Dynamics 365 using Dynamics 365 web services (secure communication via https) and loads both, the document to generate (template) and the Dynamics 365 data needed inside the document. There is no information stored on the VM that hosts the cloud service except debugging is activated - in that case, the data fetched from Dynamics 365 will show up in debug-files. 

4) Send document back to Dynamics 365:
The generated document is sent back to Dynamics 365 using web services (secured communications via https). The document itself is never stored on the VM. 

Please note: To communicate from the cloud-service to Dynamics 365 we use Server2Server authentification without the need to store login credentials on our end. 

IMPORTANT: Customers with security concerns regarding our document generation services are eligible to install DCP either on their own Azure VM or on local hardware. Please note that for performance reasons an installation in the VM is recommended. 

For Dynamics 365 Online customers the document generation service will be hosted in our Azure account. To ensure high performance it will be located in the same datacenter the Dynamics 365-instance itself is located. The installation can be done directly from our website http://www.mscrm-addons.com. 

 

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

 

If you are using DocumentsCorePack to send e-Mail with images it is recommended to insert any pictures as links. If images are not linked they get embedded into the document. Many e-Mail clients, including Outlook, see such embedded images as a potential security risk and do display them correctly.

Microsoft Word allows you to link to an image.  It is recommended to link to an image instead of adding the entire image to the Word file.  This can be helpful especially if you are using many large images with many different documents, or many times in the same document. Also if an image changes often, you only have one image which needs to be changed once, instead of updating the image in each document whenever it changes. 

 How to link to an image in DocumentsCorePack templates: 

1) Open your Microsoft Word and navigate to ❶ Insert and click on the ❷ [Pictures]-button. In this window, go to the  ❸ File name field and enter the URL of the picture, you want to insert and then click the drop down for Insert and choose ❹ Link to File like you can see it below. 

 

Please notice: The pictures you want to insert have to be saved on a webserver with access to the inserted resrouces! (e.g as image on your homepage "http://www.yourcompany/images/logo.png")

2) Next, navigate to ❶ Advanced Template Settings on the right side and select ❷ General.  Here you have to select the second check box, that says ❸ "Do not export Picture-Link Images as Base64".   The reason why you have to select this option is that otherwise the pictures get embedded even if you have inserted them as link into the document! 

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

 

 

This blog article outlines how to sort data in DocumentsCorePack templates by using the Relationship Designer.This tool allows you to sort your data individually. 

 1) First of all, open Microsoft Word and navigate to www.mscrm-addons.com. Next click on the [Insert MailMerge Fields]-button and prepare the data you want to sort, e.g. like in the example below. 

 

2) Next, navigate to the right side and select ❶ Additional. Then select the data table you want to sort - in this case, ❷ Contact (table1) and click on the  ❸ [Edit]-button. 

 

3)  In the so opened window, also called Relationship Designer, you can define how you want to sort your data. To do so, you first have to choose the ❶ Attribute and then the ❷ order you want to sort your data. In this example, we want to sort our data after the First Name Ascending, like you can see below. If you have more than one sorting Attribute, you can specify which should be first executed by setting a ❸ priority. 

 

Please note: This function will sort you all records before these will be merged. After saving your template and merged it with Dynamics 365 data, the table should look like below. 

 

It is also possible to sort grouped tables.  For more information about how to group tables in DCP .docx templates, please have a look at this blog article. 

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

This blog article outlines how to apply special settings, in detail note title and description, to your DocumentsCorePack Template. You have to access the Template Settings Dialog, which is described step by step in this article. 

1) First, navigate to ❶ www.mscrm-addons.com and click on the ❷ [Insert MailMerge Fields]-button. In the so opened tree on the right side, you have to click the ❸ [Advanced Template Settings]-button to open the Template Settings Dialog.  

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2) The Template Settings Dialog allows you to define your Template Settings individual and in detail. Navigate to ❶ General and go to the bottom of this window, to define your Note Title and Note Description. By clicking the ❷ Edit symbol of each option, you can select the fields that should be used in your Pattern. Several DocumentsCorePack properties support the same syntax. To learn more about the DCP syntax, please have a look at this article here. 

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A complete list of all the available properties can be found here.

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That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

 

 

This blog article outlines the new feature in DocumentsCorePack (.docx) templates. This feature gives you the possibility to insert page breaks after every grouping section. For more information about how to group tables in DCP (.docx) templates, please have a look at this article here. 

Please notice: This feature is only available for Dynamics 365.

After grouping your table by the field you want to define the grouping for (in this case, jobtitle), navigate to www.mscrm-addons.com and choose ❶ Table properties. In the so opened window, you have to select the second check box, that says ❷ "Insert Page break after each grouping header".  

 

And the option does what it says, as you can see the result in the figure below. Every job title is automatically displayed on a new page. 

 

This blog article outlines how to group tables in DocumentsCorePack (.docx) templates. The DocumentsCorePack Grouping functionality gives users the possibility to define an optical sorting and thus, a separation for specific fields.

Please note: If the grouping headers are displayed repeatedly or if they are mixed up, please check the sorting that is set in the RelationshipDesigner. Please make sure that the grouping field is also the selected sorting field. 

Example: 

 

How to group tables for DocumentsCorePack templates properly: 

1) First of all, open Microsoft Word and navigate to www.mscrm-addons.com. Then click on the [Insert MailMerge Fields]-button in order to create your table with DocumentsCorePack, like you can see it below.

Figure 3: DocumentsCorePack table with Insert MailMerge fields 

 

3) Now select the field which you want to define the grouping for. We want to group our table for the row Job. To do so, simply select the field <<jobtitle>> like below.